There is an increasing trend in integrating the internet with the physical world to create the Internet of Things (IoT), also referred to as Cloud of Things, Internet of Objects, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, with a prediction that up to 50 billion devices would be connected to the internet by 2020. Connecting remote devices, machines, assets and other entities to create value-based systems, to optimize a variety of goods-delivery mechanisms and to improve people's lives represent the primary value proposition for the IoT. The term IoT is used henceforth in this disclosure to include not only the internet of things or objects, but also M2M communications.
Driving this trend is the emergence of various wireless technologies comprising low-cost wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi, ZIGBEE™, Z-WAVE™, etc. and other cellular technology such as 3G and Long Term Evolution (LTE), coupled with a growing proliferation of connected things or machines such as connected consumer electronics, intelligent devices with integrated sensors, devices with actuation capabilities, smartphones, intelligent appliances, etc. This is further enabled by a plethora of applications in the sectors comprising energy, computing, transportation, security, home automation, smart cities, etc.
With the proliferation of connected things also referred to in this disclosure as IoT devices, a number of challenges have arisen in the lack of efficient communication between the connected things and the corresponding destination servers. For instance, some existing IoT solutions known as M2M usually rely on point-to-point communications using embedded hardware modules and either wireless/cellular (e.g., 3G, LTE, Wi-Fi, etc.) or wired networks, and typically use communication services such as short message service (SMS), or virtual private networks (VPN) over the internet with point-to-point tunneling to transfer the data between the connected things and the corresponding destination servers. Other IoT solutions typically rely on IP-based networks to interface devices to a cloud or middleware platform.
It is also very common that communication and data transmission from connected things to specific application servers is performed through a gateway. The gateway may be any device such as a residential gateway, a smartphone, a computer, etc. that has the ability to establish communication with one or more connected things and relay that communication to the corresponding destination servers.
To communicate data from the connected things through the gateways to corresponding destination servers owning the connected things, the gateways must typically open a connection channel to each destination server to send data and close or maintain the communication channel, reopen another communication channel for another destination server, then close or maintain the communication channel when data transmission is ended, etc. Each channel typically requires a procedure for channel establishment. This raises other challenges as the destination servers require handling of a great number of simultaneous communication channels that may stay open for a long period of time even when no data is being transmitted over them.
Furthermore, current IoT solutions encompassing M2M solutions rely on the connected things and the gateways to know the destination server's identification such as destination Internet Protocol (IP) address and/or port number or Uniform Resource Locator (URL), or Media Access control (MAC) address, etc., for routing the data. This raises yet other challenges as to keeping up with changing ownership of the connected things resulting in changing the destination server identification.
Examples of IoT systems are REST based architecture integrating an IP based or a non-IP based wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with the internet. For such systems, IETF has developed a number of protocols for accessing application services for energy constrained devices such as sensor devices. Protocols like the constrained application protocol (CoAP) [RFC7252] made it possible to provide resource constrained devices with RESTful web service functionalities and consequently to integrate WSNs with the internet. Such solutions however, require knowledge of the destination address before data is allowed to be transmitted.
Another standard solution is described by the oneM2M partnership project, where the oneM2M architecture is based on the concept of a common M2M Service Layer to ensure global functionality of M2M. Similar to the REST based architecture, the devices or the things can gain access to public or private networks through a gateway device where point to point communication with each destination server could be used to send data from the device to the corresponding destination server; therefore, knowledge of the destination server is required at the device or the gateway.
Although it does not describe a solution as the one proposed herein, the document U.S. Pat. No. 8,588,061 B2 bears some relationship with the field of the present patent application. Document U.S. Pat. No. 8,588,061 B2 discloses a method for transferring data over a network using application wire whereby the application wire is created by identifying at an edge node the application flow based on the information in the IP header of the application packet, the IP header comprising the destination identifications such as IP address, port number, etc., and subsequently maps the application flow to one or more pseudowires based on the data rate. The pseudowires refer to the emulation of an Open System Interconnection (OSI) Layer-1 or Layer-2 native service over a network and are maintained throughout the core network. The solution relies on the knowledge of destination addresses and relies on pre-existence of pseudowires.
It would be desirable to provide a scalable system and method that obviate or mitigate the above described challenges. It would also be desirable if quality of service guarantee can be achieved for all the application data carried over the scalable system.